From a scientific standpoint, the world is more prepared than ever to respond to infectious disease outbreaks; paradoxically, globalization and air travel, antimicrobial resistance, the threat of bioterrorism, and newly emerging pathogens driven by ecological, socioeconomic, and environmental factors, have increased the risk of global epidemics.1,2,3 Following the 2002–2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), global efforts to build global emergency response capabilities to contain infectious disease outbreaks were put in place.4,5,6 But the recent H1N1, Ebola, and Zika global epidemics have (...) shown unnecessary delays and insufficient coordination in response efforts.7,8,9,10 In a thoughtful and compelling essay,11 Thana C. de Campos argues that greater clarity in the definition of pandemics would probably result in more timely effective emergency responses, and pandemic preparedness. In her view, a central problem is that the definition of pandemics is based solely on disease transmission across several countries, and not on spread and severity together, which conflates two very different situations: emergency and nonemergency disease outbreaks. A greater emphasis on severity, such that pandemics are defined as severe and rapidly spreading infectious disease outbreaks, would make them “true global health emergencies,” allowing for priority resource allocation and effective collective actions in emergency response efforts. Sympathetic to the position taken by de Campos, here I highlight some of the challenges in the definition of severity during an infectious disease outbreak. (shrink)

Although empirical evidence may provide a much desired sense of certainty amidst a pandemic characterised by uncertainty, the vast gamut of available COVID-19 data, including misinformation, has instead increased confusion and distrust in authorities’ decisions. One key lesson we have been gradually learning from the COVID-19 pandemic is that the availability of empirical data and scientific evidence alone do not automatically lead to good decisions. Good decision-making in public health policy, this paper argues, does depend on the availability of reliable (...) data and rigorous analyses, but depends above all on sound ethical reasoning that ascribes value and normative judgement to empirical facts. (shrink)

Eduardo Arroyo, Armelle Auris, François Boissonnet, Paul HENRY, Pierre-Jean LABARRIERE, MATIEU, Gilles AILLAUD, Gérad THALMANN, Nicole MATHIEU, Jacques VIMARD, Michel QUAREZ, Leonardo CREMONINI, L'atelier d'Eduardo Arryo: Le carré blanc du ring, Rue Descartes, No. 7, Logiques de l'éthique (Juin 1993), pp. 149-168.

En el Cuento de un tonel, Swift denuncia a esos �innovadores en el imperio de la razón� que son los modernos. El discurso de la sátira es escéptico. Su estructura es la fuerza igual (isosthéneia escéptica) de los argumentos. Si con sus prácticas de lenguaje el escepticismo antiguo (pirronismo) buscaba liberarse de la argumentación para alcanzar la tranquilidad del alma, el texto swiftiano se desentiende de la interpretación del lector, amenazando con excluirlo, forzándolo a decidir. La controversia generada desestabiliza al (...) lector y promueve su despertar ético-político. Esto, y el uso en el orden discursivo de la simulación y la disimulación, con que Maquiavelo (autor favorito de Swift) caracteriza a las prácticas políticas, organizan una peculiar trama de la dominación. (shrink)

En el presente artículo, trato la relación entre las afecciones y lo aparente en el escepticismo antiguo. Evalúo las dimensiones ética y epistemológica de esta relación, en lo que concierne al intercambio entre el afuera y el adentro subjetivos. Entiendo aquí este intercambio en términos del continuo del conocimiento. Doy inicio a este texto con la lectura de un pasaje de los Esbozos Pirrónicos de Sexto Empírico, para proceder luego con una evaluación del conocimiento y de la afección escéptica, en (...) el marco de una revisión de los conceptos principales de esta tradición filosófica. Esto nos permitirá abordar el carácter crítico de sus postulados, así como su actualidad. In this paper I make a review of the relation between affections and the apparent in ancient skepticism. I hereby evaluate ethical and epistemological dimensions of this relation, in what concerns the exchange between the inside and the outside of subjectivity. I understand this exchange in terms of the continuum of knowledge. I begin this text with a reading of a passage of Sextus Empiricus' Outlines of Skepticism, proceeding next with an evaluation of skeptical knowledge and affection, in the context of a revision of the main concepts of this philosophical tradition. This will allow us to treat the critical character of its postulates, as well as its actuality. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that it’s not a good idea to have a theory of truth that is consistent but ω-inconsistent. In order to bring out this point, it is useful to consider a particular case: Yablo’s Paradox. In theories of truth without standard models, the introduction of the truth-predicate to a first order theory does not maintain the standard ontology. Firstly, I exhibit some conceptual problems that follow from so introducing it. Secondly, I show that (...) in second order theories with standard semantics the same procedure yields a theory that doesn’t have models. So, while having an ω- inconsistent theory is a bad thing, having an unsatisfiable theory of truth is actually worse. This casts doubts on whether the predicate in question is, after all, a truthpredicate for that language. Finally, I present some alternatives to prove an inconsistency adding plausible principles to certain theories of truth. (shrink)

La presencia gnóstica denunciada por Voegelin a finales del siglo pasado y que ha visto su expresión más fiel en las ideologías contemporáneas, ha ido mutando a diversas manifestaciones denunciadas por teóricos contemporáneos, no solo por su naturaleza inmanente, sino por su misma inconsistencia gnoseológica. Así, el presente artículo tiene por objeto profundizar en torno a las propiedades o características fundamentales del gnosticismo moderno y contemporáneo, así como en sus antecedentes gnoseológicos. Para llevar a cabo esta labor nos centraremos en (...) un análisis crítico, primero en las características del pensamiento gnóstico, fundamentalmente a partir de las ideas de Voegelin, para luego analizar sus antecedentes ubicados en el pensamiento teológico de Joaquín de Fiore y del nominalismo de Guillermo de Occam. (shrink)

In this article, we examine the ways in which the notion of interdisciplinarity was understood, implemented and experienced by researchers at a government-funded Chilean climate research centre. Our multi-site ethnography, consisting of interviews, participant observations, and document analysis, was motivated by three key aims. First, to generate an inductive, multi-faceted picture of the lived meaning of “interdisciplina” at the Centre; second, to explore whether and to what extent the “peripheral” features of the research context would exacerbate the challenges associated with (...) practicing interdisciplinarity, and third, to see whether frictions between disciplines at the Centre could be considered productive “dissonances” in Stark’s sense of the term. We found that despite the centre efforts to produce a common framework to regulate interdisciplinary research, its researchers nevertheless understood, enacted and experienced it in diverse ways. More specifically, we found that researcher´s conceptions of interdisciplinarity were coloured by their lived experiences of attempting to practice it, and in particular by the benefits and costs they associated with doing so. This in turn was linked to several variables, including the specific balance between disciplines, the absence or presence of shared, clearly-defined goals, the affirmation of a common research ethic or motivational commitment, and the structural-material conditions of the research in question. We also found that the research conditions characteristic of the Global South do tend to exacerbate the well-documented challenges associated with interdisciplinarity, yet that the adversities associated with precarious conditions were often met by increased resilience and bonding among researchers, who use creative and collaborative strategies to adapt to adversity. (shrink)

En el presente artículo, me serviré del ejemplo de las Páginas Amarillas de los Hauts-de-Seine para tratar la problemática de la inacción2 que ciertos regímenes textuales e imaginarios imponen a la subjetividad contemporánea. El pensamiento crítico, por su parte, afronta el carácter disperso del saber actual encarnando su ilogismo constitutivo, ampliando sus operaciones a nuevas formas de discurso.

This article expands Patchen Markell’s seminal problematization of The Human Condition by examining the impact that the modern developments in science and technology had on Arendt’s signature categories. Whereas Markell is interested in the systematic “architecture” of the book, I attempt to historicize Arendt’s distinctions in light of the story she tells about science and technology. From the invention of the telescope to the splitting of the atom, technoscience has provoked shifts in the hierarchies within the vita activa; spawned new (...) varieties of “labor,” “work,” and “action”; and blurred the traditional boundaries between “nature” and the “human world.” These reconfigurations draw the contours of a new, “modern world” that is different from the world whose story and conceptual tradition Arendt set out to articulate. Largely as a result of the activities of science and technology, the experiences that informed the categories of the “Western tradition” correspond to a world that is no longer our own. (shrink)

In this essay an engineer and a philosopher, after many conversations, develop an argument for why the Aristotelian version of virtue ethics is the most promising way to develop what we call artificial moral, social agents, i.e. robots. This, evidently, applies to humans as well. There are several claims: first, that humans are not born moral, they are socialized into morality; second, that morality involves affect, emotion, feeling, before it engages reason; third, that how a moral being feels is related (...) to some narrative, whether moral or not; and finally, that narrativity is what builds a sense of a “moral” I, namely an authorial moral self. (shrink)

El artículo busca dilucidar algunas características del epistolario en tanto que fuente historiográfica y encontrar claves de comparación con la autobiografía. Con importantes aspectos en común, sus propósitos, sus sesgos y la posición subjetiva de sus autores evidencian importantes diferencias. A partir de esta problemática, se analizará la correspondencia sostenida por Max Weber desde el servicio militar durante la Gran Guerra. En un período en el que no tiene intervención pública alguna, el análisis se centra en la evolución de su (...) perspectiva sobre el papel de Alemania y sobre su actividad específica en los lazaretos. Cada uno de estos aspectos se relaciona respectivamente con dos piedras angulares de la obra weberiana: el problema nacional y el proceso de burocratización. (shrink)